Journals – Open Scholarship & Scholarly Publishing

Study examines 5 commercial academic publisher profits from open access author processing charges

The authors of a recent study, “The oligopoly’s shift to open access: How the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges” in Quantitative Science Studies, a gold open access (OA) journal published by MIT Press, looks at revenue generated between 2015-2018 by the five largest academic publishers from author processing charges (APCs) for open access publication of journal articles. Over the four years, the authors conservatively estimate that SpringerNature ($589.7 million), Elsevier ($221.4 million), Wiley ($114.3 million), Taylor and Francis ($76.8 million) and Sage ($31.6 million) all derived significant revenue from gold and hybrid open access journals as funder mandates and policy directives drove a shift to open access publishing. Both the number of OA articles and APC charges increased over the four years studied: Studies show that in 2020 the global journal publishing market was valued at $9.5 billion, with open access journals accounting for $975 million of it.

The study provides a good overview of the scholarly journal publishing market and the evolution of open access funding models. The methodology covers how publications where identified along with their OA status and how APCs were determined. The data analysis shows variations in funding models (gold or hybrid) between publishers, growth of OA outputs, average APCs charged and revenue generated by publisher and by top journals. The authors note that APCs are market driven rather than based on publication cost. The Fair Open Access Alliance determined that a cost of $50 per page was enough to sustain an open access journal, and they recommend a total APC of no more than $1,000 per article. These 5 for-profit publishers are charging considerably more than that and making a greater portion of their revenue from open access publishing based on their market dominance.

This study illustrates how the dominant scholarly journal publishers are using open access article publication to increase their profits to the detriment of equitable access to publication for researchers. It also underscores how critical it is to diversify publication platforms and promote ethical practices to sustain the research enterprise.

New toolkit for existing and start-up open access journals

The Open Access Journals Toolkit is a new resource developed collaboratively by the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to guide existing and new open access journal publishers in a volatile global scholarly communication landscape. Articles (with references) cover issues of funding, setup, peer review and quality assurance, running a journal in a local or regional language, software and technical infrastructure, persistent identifiers, licensing, recruiting staff and building an editorial board, and much more. The Toolkit is organized into 6 searchable sections:

Getting started
Running a journal
Indexing
Staffing
Policies
Infrastructure.

Checklists, a definition of open access with a grid of different funding models, a glossary, an FAQ and an “About” section round out the Toolkit. It is openly licensed with Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 and can be downloaded and printed as a whole or as individual articles. Versions in English and French are currently available, with other languages forthcoming. The Toolkit is intentionally designed for accessibility and use by scholarly publishers working in different contexts and regions across the world. Because of its comprehensiveness, it serves those thinking about starting an OA journal, those considering how to better establish their journals, those who are concerned with their journal’s financial sustainability and those with challenges in specific areas. The Toolkit fills a much needed gap in the nuts and bolts of open access journal publishing.

Editors of 2 neuroscience journals quit over unethical APC charges

Over 40 editors of two Elsevier journals, NeuroImage and NeuroImage: Reports, have resigned in protest over excessively high and unsustainable author processing charges (APCs) for accepted manuscripts in these open access journals. APCs are a pay-to-publish model for open access journals, an alternative to content paywalled to readers. The APC for NeuroImage is US$3,450; NeuroImage: Reports charges $900, which will double to $1,800 from May 31st. For additional context, The Lancet Neurology, published by Elsevier, has an APC of $6,300; the fee at Nature Neuroscience, published by Springer Nature, is $11,690; and Human Brain Mapping, published by Wiley, charges $3,850.

These fees shift the burden of access to content from readers to authors. The editors who resigned from NeuroImage and NeuroImage: Reports took issue with the barrier these fees place on researcher/authors, particularly from institutions that are not well funded. They expressed to Elsevier that those fees and revenue were not justified by the costs of producing the journals. They have organized to publish a new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, with MIT Press. Publishing fees have not been announced, but are expected to be at least half of the fees charged by Elsevier, who will continue to publish NeuroImage and NeuroImage: Reports with new editors.

Report from the 15th Berlin (B15) Open Access Conference – Adapt and Advance

The 15th Berlin Open Access Conference (B15), with the theme “Adapt and Advance”, was co-hosted by the University of California and the Max Planck Society’s Open Access 2020 Initiative from September 28th – October 1st, 2021. Stakeholders in research and scholarly communication from 46 countries reflected on progress towards transforming subscription-based journal access to open dissemination of research outputs for common benefit. The goals of transformative agreements are twofold: “(1) empower authors to grant free and universal access to their peer-reviewed research while retaining their copyright, and (2) empower institutions to integrate, rationalize and rein in their financial investments in scholarly publishing.”

The Executive Summary of the conference summarizes and outlines action steps for these key takeaways:

Open access to scholarly journals is essential for progress in science and society.
Open access is advancing thanks to transformative agreements.
Negotiations with scholarly journal publishers are a pathway to openness and equity.
Open access publishing must be enabled under equitable economic conditions.
Increasing transparency of funding flows and reorganizing just a tiny share of investments can have immeasurable impact.
Further open access developments require bold new partnerships.
Scholarly publishers are embracing open access.
Mature open access strategies include different synergistic approaches.

These issues are more deeply explored in the 4 plenary sessions (with recordings and transcripts provided) and posters. The international scope and collaborative spirit of this conference signal the paths forward towards more open and equitable scholarly exchange.

UMass Amherst Libraries signs agreement with PLOS to cover Open Access publication fees in 12 journals

Effective October 1st, 2021, corresponding authors from UMass Amherst of accepted manuscripts in 12 journals published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS – an original open access, non-profit publisher) will pay no or reduced fees. The 6 journals with no fees are:

These 6 journals normally charge author processing charges of $775 to $2,575 but under this agreement, the article fee will be $400:

UMass Amherst Libraries and PLOS issued press releases with more details about the three year agreement between PLOS and the NERL Consortium.

Cambridge University Press reflects on funding OA journals

In a guest post on Scholarly Kitchen, Transforming the Transformative Agreements, Bridget Shull from Cambridge University Press celebrates the recent growth of the publisher’s open access agreements with institutions in the United States, and then describes some challenges ahead from multiple perspectives. A transformative agreement fundamentally shifts journal publishing costs from payment-to-read to payment-to-publish, with the author retaining copyright, an assigned open license and the reader having barrier-free access and re-use rights. It is but one form of funding open access journal publication.

Publication fees paid on a per article basis raise new barriers, as Shull notes, and for these reasons this type of agreement will need to evolve. Tracking article-based author fees requires new and often cumbersome administrative workflows for publishers, authors and funders (most often libraries, institutions and granting agencies). As these agreements are relatively new, each publisher is figuring out how to manage them without existing standards. Many (most?) libraries and organizations do not have the means to cover the administrative costs nor the personnel to do the work. Open access publication is hindered by bandwidth blocks. More and more publishers are offering different options for OA publication, and libraries are forced to choose which they can take on, financially and administratively. This will need to change, and initiatives to do so are already underway.

Authors, whether they are producing new types of scholarship or working from underfunded circumstances, may not have the means to pay for publication. Moving payment for publication to authors imposes a filter on research distribution based on financial circumstances rather than quality and interest of the work. The research that is published becomes more narrow and exclusive in scope.

Shull outlines widely recognized issues with transformative agreements and she calls out funder mandates as insufficient to solve them. Furthermore, open access needs broader recognition as a means to more diverse, widely used and impactful research rather than an end unto itself. More stakeholders – researchers, institutions and publishers in addition to funders – need to solve these problems together.

Research to help libraries break away from Elsevier’s Big Deal journal package

The Elsevier Title Level Pricing: Dissecting the Bowl of Spaghetti from the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication is timely as the UMass Amherst Libraries negotiate a new contract with Elsevier. Due to confidentiality agreements and variables by institution, pricing is opaque and a fair market value for each title is difficult to ascertain. By analyzing Elsevier journal pricing data provided by 5 academic libraries, the authors examine how Elsevier sets its pricing on individual journal titles for libraries that are leaving “Big Deal” packages in favor of individual journal subscriptions. They found significant variations in how final prices were determined for each institution which resulted in a range of average list prices and average cost per journal. Despite Elsevier’s pricing discrimination, each institution gained significant savings – an average of $889,400 – by moving from their Big Deal to a collection of individual journal subscriptions. This study provides other institutions who are negotiating with Elsevier data upon which to benchmark their calculations for better pricing and terms.

Calculating price, cost & impact of research articles

Requiem for impact factors and high publication charges is written by a group of biomedical scientists regarding the use of various metrics for publication assessment. It is important for librarians to keep in mind that social scientists usually do not approach research assessment in the same way that biomedical science departments often do. This article is focused on quantitative measures of quality rather than qualitative. The authors explore whether the increasing use of preprints and post publication review dramatically changes the quality of articles and how one might assess preprints which have not been peer reviewed before their publication online. The authors point out that higher cost of author processing charges (APCs) is correlated with higher Journal Impact Factor (JIF), which has apparently led to scholars viewing higher cost of publishing as a proxy for journal quality. Since neither the JIF nor the cost of APCs is an accurate gauge of quality, this is misguided. Higher APCs are also a barrier to authors working in less affluent countries, institutions, and disciplines. The authors examine the idea of downloads as a measure of article importance, but dismiss this given that it makes comparing OA and toll access articles impossible. The authors conclude that although there are many ways to calculate article or author impact, there is not a simply calculated metric to substitute for JIFs and H-indices, which is why they have such persistence.

Seismologists push for diamond open access

The Seismica Initiative: towards a community-driven, Diamond Open Access journal for seismological research is a post on the European Geosciences Union blog that describes a response to a tweet from Nature announcing their author processing charge of €9,500/article (roughly $11,400) to publish open access. By contrast, Volcanica is a fully open access journal that has published 37 peer reviewed articles in the past 2 years without charging any author fees. Seismologists were inspired to create a task force to replicate this model for a diamond open access journal in their discipline. The post includes an excellent graphic (though not Creative Commons licensed) that illustrates the diamond open access space: free to authors, authors retain copyright, free to users and peer-reviewed. In the case of Seismica, the journal will be managed by members of the seismological community and “in the absence of any financial incentives, we ensure that the journal serves the needs of the community before anything else.” A researcher-driven, inclusive process is designed:

“to map out a route towards launching the journal that ensures a sustainable future. Core tasks include finding an administrative/financial host (a library or university press), identifying technical requirements for the manuscript submission platform and journal website, and acquiring the necessary funding.”

Volcanica, and potentially Seismica, give us examples of platforms for non-profit scholarly communication as envisioned by Jean-Claude Guédon.

Study of open access journals published without author fees

The “OA Diamond Journals Study” commissioned by cOAlition S is a robust work in multiple parts: findings, recommendations, references, journals inventory and dataset. It looks at the global landscape of an estimated 29,000 journals that are free for readers and authors. Only about a third of these are indexed in DOAJ and they represent diverse regions (45% in Europe, 25% in Latin America, 16% in Asia, 5% in the US/Canada) and disciplines (60% HSS, 22% science, 17% medicine). We don’t hear enough about them, perhaps because they are less common in the U.S. and Canada, less English-centric, and more often published by small, niche organizations. The majority of the journals exhibit academic rigor and conform to standards that make them compliant with Plan S. However, most depend on volunteers, governments and universities for funding. The recommendations focus on potential efficiency gains, collaborations, and principles-based action plans to secure non-commercial funding. As one who recognizes the barriers that author processing charges (APCs) create, I’m a fan of the Diamond OA and the financial models that support them. This study provides a useful and detailed landscape for understanding and planning for sustainable OA Diamond journals.